Nearly half of all Android devices run Jelly Bean

It’s taken seemingly forever, but Jelly Bean is now on nearly 50% of active Android devices — 48.6% to be exact — as of October 2nd, 2013.

The stats, which are released each month, indicate that Jelly Bean’s slow-and-steady march to the top has not exactly fixed Android’s fragmentation problem, but has allowed developers to target Android 4.0+ devices more readily without risking alienating large swaths of users.

While Gingerbread still powers a staggering 28% of active devices, which could mean some 280 million if we use Google’s recent announcement of 1 billion activated Androids as an indicator, developers can take the Ice Cream Sandwich number, which is dropping but still powers 20.6%, and combine it with Jelly Bean for a comforting 69.2% of all devices.

Android 4.3, the newest version of the OS to hit Nexus devices and some Samsung and HTC products, is only on 1.5% of the total, and with KitKat nearing its inevitable rollout, it seems likely that most devices will likely skip directly from Android 4.2 to 4.4.

It must be noted that these stats only include Android 2.2+ devices and only those that are actively visiting Google Play each month, not those that connect to forked app stores like Amazon.